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Bill Cunliffe |
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Bill is equally in demand as a performer, arranger and composer. The year 2010 has been a banner year for Bill winning his first Grammy for his arrangement of his “West Side Story Medley,” followed up by the premiere of his original composition “fourth stream . . . La Banda” at Verizon Hall in Philadelphia, which was reprised by a performance at Alice Tulley Hall at Lincoln Center in New York. Bill earned a Master’s degree from the Eastman School of Music. After teaching three years at Central State University in Wilberforce, Ohio, Bill went toured with the Buddy Rich Big Band as pianist and arranger, doing two tours of Europe with Frank Sinatra. He then played and toured with jazz world greats including Ray Brown, Joe Henderson, Freddie Hubbard, Art Farmer, James Moody and Joshua Redman. Bill is the author of “Jazz Keyboard Toolbox,” which has become a standard jazz reference book. He won the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Piano Award and has received stipends from the National Endowment for the Arts. Bill currently performs with his own trio, sextet and Latin jazz nonet, as well as the Clayton Brothers Quintet, with trumpeter Terell Stafford and flutist Holly Hofmann. His CD, “Imaginacion,” by his Latin jazz nonet charted at #2 on national jazz radio. Bill also composes classical music, having written among other compositions a three-movement “Romantic” Fantasy for piano and orchestra and “Viva Mexico” for orchestra, both of which he recorded. He performs his own distinctive arrangement of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” with orchestras and plays with his group, Trimotif. Bill recently joined the faculty at California State University Fullerton and has been a teacher at the Vail Jazz Workshop for the past 14 years. |